1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to data fusion and more particularly to parameterization of non-linear/non-Gaussian data distributions for efficient information sharing in distributed sensor networks.
2. Brief Description of Prior Developments
In the field of multi-sensor data fusion, decentralized data fusion has become an attractive alternative to centralized data fusion primarily due to the inherent robustness and scalability features that decentralized architectures offer. In its most primitive form, a decentralized sensor network involves processing capability at each sensor—eliminating the need and subsequent vulnerability of a central processing node—along with the capacity for each sensor to efficiently communicate its information to neighboring sensors without requiring any knowledge of the network topology, as disclosed in H. Durrant-Whyte and M. Stevens, “Data Fusion in Decentralized Sensing Networks,” Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Information Fusion, 7-10 Aug. 2001, Montreal, Canada, the contents of which are incorporated herein by reference. To date, the majority of fielded implementations utilizing decentralized data fusion have relied on linear/Gaussian assumptions and the Kalman/information filter. The foregoing is disclosed in E. Nettleton, “Decentralised Architectures for Tracking and Navigation with Multiple Flight Vehicles,” PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, February 2003; J. McClellan, G. Edelson and R. Chellappa, “The Listening Eye,” Proceedings of the 2004 Collaborative Technology Alliance Conference, 5-7 May 2004, Washington D.C.; R. Alexander, J. Anderson, J. Leal, D. Mullin, D. Nicholson and G. Watson, “Distributed Picture Compilation Demonstration,” Proceedings of SPIE (Signal Processing, Sensor Fusion and Target Recognition XIII), Vol. 5429, 12-14 Apr. 2004; D. Dudgeon, G. Edelson, J. McClellan and R. Chellappa, “Listening Eye II,” Proceedings of the 2005 Collaborative Technology Alliance Conference, 31 May-3 Jun. 2005, Crystal City, Va.; J. Broussard and M. Richman, “Decentralized Common Operating Picture Compilation in Support of Autonomous Cooperative Behaviors,” Proceedings of the 2005 Collaborative Technology Alliance Conference, 31 May-3 Jun. 2005, Crystal City, Va., the contents of which are incorporated herein by reference. Even though such systems have produced impressive results, the natural desire to utilize a wider mixture of more complex sensor types—potentially exhibiting observation and/or process non-linearities along with non-Gaussian distributions—has generated a need for more generalized information fusion techniques. A variety of methods have been applied to the problem of non-linear/non-Gaussian decentralized data fusion in which the majority of such methods have been focused on particle filters, Gaussian mixture models or Parzen density estimators, or some combination of the two. The foregoing is disclosed in M. Rosencrantz, G. Gordon and S. Thrun, “Decentralized Sensor Fusion with Distributed Particle Filters,” Proceedings of the 19th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, 7-10 Aug. 2003, Acapulco, Mexico; M. Borkar, V. Cevher and J. H. McClellan, “A Monte-Carlo Method for Initializing Distributed Tracking Algorithms” Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, 14-19 May 2006, Toulouse, France; M. Ridley, B. Upcroft, L. L. Ong, S. Kumar and S. Sukkarieh, “Decentralised Data Fusion with Parzen Density Estimates,” Proceedings of the 2004 Intelligent Sensors, Sensor Networks and Information Processing Conference, 14-17 Dec. 2004, Melbourne, Australia; B. Upcroft, L. L. Ong, S. Kumar, T. Bailey, S. Sukkarieh, and H. Durrant-Whyte, “Rich Probabilistic Representations for Bearing Only Decentralized Data Fusion,” Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Information Fusion, 25-29 Jul. 2005, Philadelphia, Pa; L. L. Ong, M. Ridley, B. Upcroft, S. Kumar, T. Bailey, S. Sukkarieh and H. Durrant-Whyte, “A Comparison of Probabilistic Representations for Decentralised Data Fusion,” Proceedings of the 2005 Intelligent Sensors, Sensor Networks, and Information Processing Conference, 5-8 Dec. 2005, Melbourne, Australia; L. L. Ong, B. Upcroft, M. Ridley, T. Bailey, S. Sukkarieh and H. Durrant-Whyte, “Decentralized Data Fusion with Particles,” Proceedings of the 2005 Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation, 5-7 Dec. 2005, Sydney, Australia; X. Sheng, Y. Y. Hu and P. Ramanathan, “Distributed particle filter with GMM approximation for multiple targets localization and tracking in wireless sensor network,” Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on Information Processing in Sensor Networks, pp. 181-188, 25-27 Apr. 2005, Los Angeles, Calif., the contents of which are incorporated herein by reference. All of the aforementioned techniques are capable of performing generalized estimation, however, not all techniques lend themselves well to decentralized applications as a result of the scalability concerns they inherently generate.
A need still exists, however, for a highly-scalable, Bayesian approach to the problem of performing generalized, multi-source data fusion and target tracking in decentralized sensor networks.